Counterfactual History 1
Despite the soft focus of the orientalist media, North Korea is not an enigma.
The fact of its mere “brute existence” shouldn’t seduce or astonish us any more
than the “diversity” of the capitalist system that seemingly hems it in on all
sides. And yet its stubborn long-term survival, much like capitalism’s, quite ar-
guably does represent something of an enigma. The question of North Korea to-
day is that of the political endurance and continuity of a regime whose “social
experiment” should long ago have been jettisoned into the dustbin of history.
Its blanket demonization and ostracism by the “international community” is
proof of a profoundly abnormal country, a zombie state which certainly resists
the norms of the modern liberal state. As Jon Halliday once put it, “no state in
the world lives with such a wide gap between its own self-image and self-pres-
entation as a socialist ‘paradise on earth’ and the view of most of the rest of the
world that it is a bleak, backward workhouse ruled by a megalomaniac tyrant,
Kim Il Sung.”2 And yet, all appearances aside, what I want to suggest is that
there is a rational kernel at work here, not so much “beneath” the thin veneer of
paranoid propaganda that comprises its overtly repressive state apparatus, but
in terms of North Korea’s position within the uneven and combined develop-
ment of global capitalism. Modernization too is a process which, all appearanc-
149
es aside, North Korea has been strongly committed to since its foundation, even
if in this respect the ideology is prone to part company with the reality, as the
much-trumpeted “successes” of its social plan become ever more symptomatic
of massive and grotesque system failure. North Korea didn’t suddenly fall from
the sky. The evil features of this “hermit kingdom” have grown out of the very
traits of the modern state in general. Journalistic platitudes and general bias
aside, North Korea is not a feudal state or an anachronistic theocracy, but rather
1
This work was supported by the Kyung Hee University Research Grant (KHU-20150648).
2
Jon Halliday, “The North Korean Enigma” in: New Left Review, London, 127, 1980, p. 18.
* Kyung Hee University, School of Global Communication, Republic of Korea
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Superman didn’t land in North Korea. In Superman: Red Son3 Mark Miller presents
us with a counterfactual history which explores what might have happened had
the rocket ship carrying the young alien from Krypton landed on Earth slightly
ahead of time. In this case the “advanced” landing deposits the future superhero
in Ukraine, where instead of growing up in the free state of Kansas and becoming
a journalist on the Daily Planet, he grows up on a collective farm and becomes a
journalist on Pravda. One needs to set aside one’s prejudices in order to begin to
bring North Korea into proper focus—although granted such formal reversals of
good versus evil are limited in their critical scope. My contention here will be that
the “monstrosity” of North Korea is nothing more than the unmasked identity
of the modern state, the naked face of state violence. What one should question
here is not what kind of country North Korea is, but instead what North Korea
contributes to questions of modernity and modernization. In short, the suppos-
edly “enigmatic” aspect of North Korea lies at the extremity of modernization,
which has been pursued by both the socialist bloc and the capitalist bloc in the
postwar world. As such the North Korean question should be revised in order to
ask why the dual process of modernization and democratization ends up in the
strange accomplishment of its secular theocratic regime.
The political ambition of North Korea as a modern state seems to lurk in its
official name: The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Like South
Korea, North Korea insists on being the only legitimate government of the en-
150
tire peninsula. North Korea calls itself a “democratic” people’s republic—un-
like South Korea, which is simply “republic” (ROK)—whose people (dêmos) are
nominally deprived of power (krátos). Historically the appellation of a Demo-
cratic People’s Republic is certainly not unique to North Korea (one thinks of
the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (1987—91) under Mengistu Haile
Mariam). The idea of popular fronts as adherents of “democracy” can be traced
back to Stalin’s (failed) attempt to create a multi-class form of government in
the Soviet Union. In the case of North Korea the obsession with modernization
3
Mark Miller, et. al., Superman: Red Son (New York: DC Comics, 2004).
north korea and the enigma of survival
and nation-building under the direction of the country’s communist party, the
Worker’s Party of Korea, goes some way towards explaining the endurance of
the idea of “democracy” in a supposedly socialist state.
Kim Il Sung, its visionary leader, not to mention the country’s deity, was the
Superman sent down from Soviet heaven to construct a new country. In North
Korean propaganda, Kim promised his people daily rations of “rice and meat
soup” for participating in guerrilla warfare against the Japanese imperialists.
After liberation, the guerilla figure took power during the Soviet occupation
and started to implement a strongly partisan agenda. First of all, as much as in
other post-colonial countries, Kim Il Sung and his followers set about reinvent-
ing the past. The situation whereby the North Korean leader created the racial
self-image of his nation is described in the following terms:
Though most Koreans in 1945 had no memory of life before Japanese rule, neither
the Soviets nor the Americans saw a need to de-colonize hearts and minds. That
the Koreans now hated Japan was taken as proof that they had always done so.
Nor did either power punish former propagandists. In Seoul, the cultural scene’s
spontaneous efforts to come to terms with its past were soon undermined by
the settling of personal scores and a general refusal to acknowledge a collec-
tive guilt. Obscure ex-collaborators condemned the famous ones, those who had
propagandized in Korean asserted moral superiority over those who had done so
in Japanese, and erstwhile ‘proletarians’ acted as if their brief prison stays in the
1930s made up for everything they had written afterward. 4
When Korea was liberated from colonialism, a ground zero emerged on which
anybody obtaining power could fabricate anything about history. The situation
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provided the perfect condition for modernization. Even though Kim Il Sung was
one day a commander in Mao Zedong’s army and spent a year at an infantry
officer school in the USSR during the Pacific War, his ideological background
was unlikely to have familiarized him a great deal with Marxism-Leninism. As
North Korean propaganda frequently emphasizes today, he was in those days
more inclined to the alliance between socialism and nationalism. He even in-
sisted that Korea was on the stage of democratic reform and construction, not
4
Bryan Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters
(New York: Melville House, 2010), p. 30.
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socialism as such.5 Needless to say, this does not mean that North Korea came to
“communism” via nationalism. The communist regime was implanted in Korea
by the USSR and backed up by the Red Army from the time of its foundation.6
Challenging the nationalist intellectuals such as Cho Man Sik, Kim attempted
to consolidate his support base and mobilized more people to participate in
constructing his regime.
The official name of North Korea indicates the historical background of Kim’s
nation-building project. The “democratic people” are those who join in the
democratic reform and construction against the United States-led world order.
The emphasis of the people who advocate democracy, i.e. common people’s
rule, reveals the “democratic paradox” as such: if everybody rules, who would
be ruled? As Carl Schmitt points out, those who command and those who obey
are identical in democracy.7 If democracy means that the sovereign of an as-
sembly composed of all people can change the laws and constitution at will, the
question remains who belongs to the people and who does not? The people able
to decide the law at will must be determined. Accordingly “Democratic People’s
Republic” is inclusive and at the same time exclusive in its constitutional ar-
rangements. It seeks to include those who agree on democratic reform and con-
struction and excludes those who disagree, as the very basis of its constitution.
5
Chong-Sik Lee and Robert A. Scalapino, North Korea: Building of the Monolithic State (Ber-
wyn: The KHU Press, 2017), p. 43.
6
Ibid., p. 83.
7
Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Allen Kennedy (Cambridge
MA: The MIT Press, 1988), pp. 14–15.
8
Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), p. 43.
north korea and the enigma of survival
Kim criticized both “the Right opportunist view” and “the Left opportunist
view” on the dictatorship of the proletariat in relation to the transition period
of the communist revolution, before setting out his own theory of the third way,
the so-called Juche:
We must take into account such specific realities of ours in order to give correct
solutions to the questions of the transition period and the dictatorship of the pro-
letariat. Bearing this point in mind, I consider it excessive to regard the transition
period in our country as the period up to the higher phase of communism. I deem
it right to regard it as the period up to socialism. But it is wrong to believe that the
transition period will come to a close as soon as the socialist revolution is victorious
and the socialist system is established. Considering the issue on the basis of what
the founders of Marxism-Leninism said, or considering it in the light of the experi-
ences we have gained in our actual struggle, we cannot say that a complete social-
ist society is already built just because the capitalist class has been overthrown and
the socialist revolution carried through after the seizure of power by the working
class. We, therefore, have never said that the establishment of the socialist system
means the complete victory of socialism. Then, when will the complete socialist
society come into being? Complete victory of socialism will come only when the
class distinction between the workers and the peasantry has disappeared and the
middle classes (particularly the peasant masses) actively support us.9
According to Kim’s argument, the problem is not so much the transition of the
capitalist mode of production to a socialist one as that of the “working-classi-
zation” of the middle classes. Kim points out that “as long as the peasants are
not working-classized, the support they may give us cannot be firm and is bound
to be rather unstable”.10 How then is social transformation to be achieved? Kim
153
places the emphasis on rapid economic development as the means for the con-
solidation of socialism. He argues that “to this end, the technological revolution
should be carried out to such an extent as the advanced capitalist countries have
turned their countryside capitalistic, so that farming may be mechanized, chem-
icalization and irrigation be introduced, and the eight-hour day be adopted”.11
9
Kim Il Sung, Juche! Speeches and Writings of Kim Il Sung, ed. Li Yuk-Sa (New York: Gross-
man Publishers, 1972), p. 117.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., p. 118.
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What should be stressed in Kim’s speech is not his vulgar reception of Sta-
linism, but rather his adaption of Stalinist ideas in North Korea. Kim rejects
Stalin’s assumption that the USSR has successfully purged the legacy of the
bourgeois society and asks rhetorically, “what, then, shall we say is the society
that will exist after the triumph of the socialist revolution and accomplishment
of socialist transformation, until the disappearance of the class distinction
between the workers and the peasants?”13 Kim insists that the dictatorship of
the proletariat must continue in order to eliminate class differences. This is a
crucial point for understanding the ideological structure of nation-building in
North Korea. However, what Kim really sought to achieve was not, as Barbara
Demick says, “merely to build a new country; he wanted to build better people,
to reshape human nature.”14 This project to reconstruct consciousness is called
154
Juche, which stands for the independence of people. Its doctrine is “holding
fast to an independent position, rejecting dependence on others, using one’s
own brains, believing in one’s own strength, displaying the revolutionary spirit
of self-reliance.”15 On the surface at least it certainly recalls the liberal rubric
of self-government. Nonetheless, one distinctive aspect could be identified in
12
Joseph Stalin, Works, Volume 14 (London: Red Star Press, 1978), p. 320.
13
Kim, op. cit., p. 120.
14
Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (New York: Spiegel and
Grau, 2010), p. 44.
15
Ibid.
north korea and the enigma of survival
the ideology of Juche: people’s confidence in their leader is essential to the es-
tablishment of such independence. This is where the psychic life of power is
introduced into the political.
North Korea may indeed be characterized as grotesque, but it is not the “Impos-
sible State.” Victor Cha describes North Korea as being caught between life and
death after the collapse of the “mighty Soviet Union.”16 Cha’s understanding of
North Korea betrays the typical bias shown towards the country, which is of-
ten misrecognized through the liberal prism of democracy. It is intriguing that
Cha confesses his inability to solve the enigma of North Korea’s survival. He
suggests that the reason why North Korea has survived—though “many others
of its ilk have long since collapsed, and as revolutions in the Middle East and
North Africa spell the demise of the few remaining ones like it”—resides in the
over-the-top personality cult of the Kim family.17 Cha correctly brings into focus
what Kim Il Sung intends with the term Juche. The doctrine of Juche is nothing
less than the secular version of Christianity, wherein fidelity to the supreme fig-
ure of authority sets one free from the fear of death. Kim is the “dear respected
leader comrade,” the symbol of a political religion. However, the idolization of
a singular political leader is hardly a feature unique to North Korea.
There is actually no mystery about the North Korean political system. The North
155
Korean state is not an enigmatic entity and never has been. What North Korea
had was simply a highly skillful political leader who knew how to build an aura
of enchanting charismatic power around him. This leader understood the effi-
cacy of this power for mobilizing the masses toward ambitious political goals,
and he was committed to keeping the power not only during his lifetime but also
beyond the time of his rule. Modern world history abounds with similar charis-
matic, visionary leaders and the stories about their rise and fall. The same is true
16
Victor Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (New York: Ecco, 2013), p. 7.
17
Ibid., p. 13.
alex taek-gwang lee
in the history of the Cold War and in the political history of the communist world
that constituted the moiety of the Cold War international order.18
Kwon and Chung resist the demonization of the communist regime and attempt
to deconstruct the fetishism of liberal democracy. They point out that “the per-
formance of secular revolutionary politics, while aiming to demystify tradition-
al religious norms and mystical ideas … often involved the mystification of the
authority and power of the revolutionary leadership.”19 As they rightly claim,
what is at issue is not the cult of personality, but its sustainability in North
Korea. How does North Korea’s charismatic politics outlive others? According
to Weber, any charismatic authority must be subject to “interpretation or devel-
opment in an anti-authoritarian direction.”20 This anti-authoritarian direction
leads to the “transformation of charisma.” If the enchanted charisma of the
political leader is supposed to be disenchanted by the process of moderniza-
tion, then the case of North Korea would seem to suggest that Weber’s theory of
charismatic politics is problematic.
18
Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung, North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics (London:
Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, 2012), p. 1.
19
Ibid.
20
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons, trans. A.
M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: The Free Press, 1947), p. 386.
21
Ibid.
north korea and the enigma of survival
es. If North Korea thrives on the sovereign defence of its charismatic politics,
is it really accurate to regard it, formally speaking, as a model socialist coun-
try? This question currently animates the political group of left nationalists in
South Korea, who still concur on the pan-national authenticity of North Korea.
It seems that the problem with Weber’s theory lies in his identification of ration-
alization or modernization with the marketization of capitalism. His conceptu-
alization of charisma is descriptive and does not bear out the situation of North
Korea. In respect of this weakness, Kwon and Chung put forward the concept
of a “theater state” to account for the endurance of North Korean politics in
citing the works of Clifford Geertz, Wada Haruki and Carol Medlicott.22 In short,
North Korea is a theater state in which all members of the community play a
part and, at the same time, watch “the drama of power transfer from the coun-
try’s founding leader, Kim Il Sung, to his eldest son and the country’s former
leader, Kim Jong Il.”23 With this concept, Wada also underscores North Korea’s
obsession with the transmission of power down the generations and regards
it as the ritualization of its partisan tradition. Wada’s adoption of the concept
of a “theater state” seems clear; to attribute the grotesque dimensions of North
Korea to its pre-modern or feudalist remnants. Furthermore, Medlicott argues
that “the North Korean political order is fundamentally Confucian.”24 However,
outright displays of affection towards the beloved leader hardly provide deci-
sive evidence that North Koreans are saturated with Confucianism. As Myers
points out, “almost all cultures espouse respect for one’s parents, and kinship
metaphors have been part of political language since time immemorial.”25 In
this sense it seems that Wada’s and Medlicott’s premise, commonly shared by
other North Korea commentators, neglects the bigger picture. Their concept of
a “theater state” is too anthropological, too mired in the myths of “primitive
157
peoples,” to capture the reality of North Korea and its political regime.
The theatrical spectacle of power is just a symptom, not the cause of the gro-
tesque. The theory of a “theater state” reiterates the problem that Weber’s the-
ory of charismatic politics reveals. These approaches fail to gain access to the
22
Kwon and Chung, op. cit., pp. 44–45.
23
Ibid., p. 44.
24
Ibid., p. 45.
25
Myers, op. cit., p. 97.
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In Secret State: Inside North Korea, Will Ridley’s CNN special report of 2017, a
North Korean boy, whose birthday party is being prepared by his school, in-
forms the foreign journalist that the dear respected leader, Kim Jung Un, cares
for him and his classmates more than their own parents, and gives them more
love than their parents could ever provide.26 Setting aside the overt ideological
agenda of such hot media, the journalist takes the interview with the boy as
confirmation of an ultra-paternalist leadership in North Korea. Should we be
surprised by the deep roots of such authoritarian constitutions, of which North
Korea is admittedly an extreme variety?
Cicero wrote that “since our country provides more benefits and is a parent
prior to our biological parents, we have a greater obligation to it than to our
parents.”27 The idea of a parental constitution, or the fundamental bond that
links pater familias and res publica, is in actual fact an intriguing philosophical
question. As Jochen Martin has argued:
those aspects concerning the agnatic familia and the power of the paterfamilias
are not to be taken as “private” aspects relegated to domestic life. Instead they
158
are essential to the political and social organization of the res publica Romana –
especially the extensive powers of the paterfamilias, his ius vitae necisque, have
to be paralleled to the magistrates’ potestas.28
26
Secret State – Inside North Korea. CNN, 2017. Available at: <youtu.be/9C0zTmjMxEg>.
27
Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Commonwealth and On the Laws, trans. James Zetzel (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 1.
28
Ann-Cathrin Harders, “Beyond Oikos and Domus: Modern Kinship Studies and the Ancient
Family” in: Families in the Greco-Roman World, eds. Ray Laurence and Agneta Stromberg
(London: Continuum, 2012), p.17.
north korea and the enigma of survival
One should be wary of trying to transpose a politics from the domestic realm
into the realm of real politics and the executive power of the state, which in
the case of North Korea amounts to the charismatic leadership of a sole figure.
In the Roman context the authority of the pater familias is limited—“embed-
ded”—by and within the overriding terms of the res publica. Occasions were
few when the pater familias could act on behalf of the state and take the law
into his own hands.29 One should be equally wary of practicing Orientalism
by contriving to make North Korea conform to certain “universal” patterns of
political constitution, which are no less embedded in Greco-Roman myth for all
that.30 For those who consume North Korea as the spectacle of grotesque polit-
ical failure, its outlandish society cannot fail to be mysterious or, better still,
“exotic”. Nonetheless, the “strangeness” of North Korea is equally intelligible
through the experience of foreign intervention and the encounter with Western
political traditions. As Myers argues, North Korea’s conflation of nationalism
with socialism was founded on the “blood-based Japanese nationalism of the
colonial era.”31 Like South Korea, the whole nation-building process in North
Korea is “the slavish imitation of foreign models and an often contemptuous
indifference to indigenous traditions.”32
Kim Il Sung himself emphasized a break from the traditions of feudalism and
urged his people to renovate everyday life according to the USSR’s superior cul-
ture. Kim’s compulsion to modernize North Korea was consistent with his the-
ory of a socialism conceived in terms of Juche. Adopting Lenin’s New Economic
Policy, Kim set up the Seven-Year Plan to clean up the residues of feudalism:
The fundamental tasks of the Seven-Year Plan in our country are to carry out
the all-round technical and cultural revolution on the basis of the triumphant
159
socialist system, thereby laying the solid material and technical foundations
of socialism and greatly improving the material and cultural life of the people.
In a country like ours, where there were no industrial revolution and normal
29
Ibid.
30
On the relation of myth and law see Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth
and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1988). Jason Barker references the
book in his fascinating analysis of the drama of civil war; see his contribution to this
volume.
31
Myers, op. cit., p. 37.
32
Ibid.
alex taek-gwang lee
stages of capitalist development in the past, the technical revolution poses itself
as a task of special importance during the socialist construction. In conformity
with the urgent demands of social development, we have completed the socialist
transformation of production relations before the technical reconstruction of the
national economy, thereby opening up a broad avenue for the development of the
productive forces, particularly for the carrying out of the technical revolution.33
See Greg Sharzer’s contribution to this volume on the selective readings by acceleration-
34
ists of Marx’s theory of the economic forces and social relations that define capitalism.
north korea and the enigma of survival
The difference between disciplinary power and biopower resides in the way in
which the former focuses on the population as masses rather than on the body
as a biological unit, or on human beings as a species. According to Foucault,
liberalism is the framework of biopolitics: “the principle of the self-limitation
of governmental reason.”35 Liberalism celebrates limited government, and gov-
erning less, and maximizing economic efficiency by setting the individual to
work in the element of its own design, or “program,” and thus in spite of any po-
litical structure that might limit its own self-governance. One might speculate
that the relative autonomy of the social practices comprising the social forma-
tion as a whole today extends to individuals themselves: for every individual, a
distinct practice; and, crucially, every individual as a distinct practice. Leaving
the question of agency and the political subject aside—and there is cause to
wonder whether there is any such thing in North Korea—what appears as the
oxymoronic articulation of a bio-politics suggests a return to the metaphysical
conception of the world as the non-interaction of monads.
But how does this leave the state philosophy of Juche? It is my contention, and
in these few limited remarks I have attempted to begin to sketch out the the-
sis, that such a philosophy might be broadly compatible with the self-reflexive
praxis of self-governing, and the formation of self-reliant individuals endowed
with the “free will” to support the dear respected leader. It goes without saying
that the state-form and the drive toward modernization is a near-universal po-
litical ambition, and has become a condition of the political the world over. All
politics, whether radical or reactionary, must sooner or later “encounter” the
liberal nation-state, whether in the guise of friend or enemy. But the ongoing
and stubborn contradiction of North Korea resides in the fact that its grotesque
incarnation of the state-form would seem untroubled by and, indeed, in certain
161
key respects perfectly in tune with, the liberal incarnation. Accompanying the
driving force and ideology of modernization there is the seeming paradox of an
enduring charismatic leadership which revives and perhaps even outdoes the
most blatant excesses of Stalin’s cult of personality—although, let us not forget,
Kim Jung Un is hardly the only would-be Superman presently grandstanding
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at Collège de France 1978–79 (New York:
35
on the world stage.36 For this reason, North Korea does not represent an alien
form of humanity, but has rather come to symbolize one of modernity’s mon-
sters: the extreme outlier of a liberal system where the freedom of self-reliance
on one hand, and more overtly disciplinary forms of government and state con-
trol on the other, are differences in degree, rather than qualitative differences
in kind. Rethinking North Korean from this vantage point will arguably provide
a more constructive basis for tackling the far more awkward question of the
transition to new and more progressive political regimes.
162
On 16 June 2018, days following the US-North Korea summit in Singapore, Donald Trump
36
said (jokingly?) of Kim: “He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to
do the same.” Available at: <www.cnbc.com/2018/06/15/trump-wants-people-to-listen-to-
him-like-north-koreans-do-to-kim-jong-un.html>.